


Ryan story #1

by fictionalaspect



Series: Unfinished, Abandoned, Snippets, Bits and Pieces [3]
Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Character Study, Gen, M/M, Unreliable Narrator, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 13:56:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictionalaspect/pseuds/fictionalaspect
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'm looking for something with <i>character</i>," he'd explained in L.A., and the realtor had drummed her long, manicured nails on the polished wooden table and hmmm'ed thoughtfully. There's any number of places he could be renting, condos full of windows and gleaming appliances, but that's not what Ryan wants, and he says as much to her when she points this out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ryan story #1

**Author's Note:**

> It's really hard to sustain a story that has one character living alone, by himself, and still make it interesting. I had no clear ending in mind, so you can fill in your own personal favorite Panic! pairing.

The house has high, arched windows and gray-green trim, brown wooden paneling and a front yard full of wind-tumbled, scruffy weeds. There's a dirt driveway and a small toolshed, a strange wrap-around porch and uneven steps leading up to the front door.

It is entirely out of place in the desert.

Ryan had taken one look at it through the smudged window of the realtor's shiny new Suburu and thought _yes_ , even as he'd allowed himself to be led around inside, made noncommital, vaguely pleased noises at the upstairs bathroom and carpeted basement and ancient refrigerator muttering to a beat all its own.

"I'm looking for something with _character_ ," he'd explained in L.A., and the realtor had drummed her long, manicured nails on the polished wooden table and hmmm'ed thoughtfully. There's any number of places he could be renting, condos full of windows and gleaming appliances, but that's not what Ryan wants, and he says as much to her when she points this out.

"I'm a musician," he explains, when the realtor raises a polite eyebrow at his price range. "I'm working on a solo album, I need a place for a few months where I can get away." Ryan had bet that she would be entirely unaware of who he was, had chosen this place specifically because it didn't cater to bright young things, and something settles back down in his chest when she glances over his paperwork and lets the matter slide.

It's not that Ryan doesn't like being recognized. It's a high like nothing else, a high he's been costing and riding on for a while now. Some days Ryan suspects he needs it more than he should, like if he had to choose between breathing and fame he might choose the former. It's just that lately everything in him has started to ache, a dense, dissolute feeling centered down in his bones. The parties don't seem quite so bright as they once did and anyway, he needs to write his album. He just needs to get away for a little bit, that's all.

(He hears the ghost of Brendon's voice saying snidely that he needs it more than he needs friends, but Ryan pushes that aside.)

So Ryan had gotten back in the car and been driven back to his hotel, keys jingling in his pocket, three months deposit and security paid cash, promises of paperwork to be sent later on, just a formality, Mr. Ross, honestly. Alex was out for a few weeks and helped him load the rental car through his blurry haze of his hangover, pounding on the hood obnoxiously and declaring the small hatchback fit for a king.

Ryan had slipped on his sunglasses and tried to remember if he'd thought to pack water. He thought how much he hated having to stop and piss in the desert, so maybe it was better if he didn't have any water for the drive. His shoes always got all dusty.

—

He left LA at noon and got there by six and promptly fell asleep on the bare mattress in the upstairs bedroom, only to be woken up some indeterminable time later by his stomach growling. He'd eaten on the road but he hadn't stopped for groceries. Ryan found a plastic bag in the trunk containing a six-pack of Heineken, a large bag of gummi worms, two sleeves of saltines, a can of tuna, and a note from Z telling him he was a dumbass.

Ryan searched around in the kitchen but couldn't manage to locate a can opener, so he sat out on the porch and ate the gummi worms and the saltines and drank two of the beers until he didn't feel quite so nauseous. His hangover was a tight pulse somewhere behind his left temple and Ryan thought about how much they'd drank the night before and the bloody tissues he'd found stuffed in the bathroom trash in the morning and how it was probably good he was out here for a while because his post-nasal drip was getting to be kind of a bitch. He vaguely remembered a child's rocking horse in his living room, and that someone had at some point broken a guitar string. It had been a good night.

There were no outside lights but Ryan could mostly see with the light from the porch, so he pulled out his guitar from the hatchback and went to go see if he could maybe find a blanket inside the house. It was haphazardly furnished, seemingly a small graveyard of things other wanderers had left behind, like a bicycle missing its front tire in the hallway and a set of chinese porcelain dolls carefully lined up over the mantelpiece. Ryan stared at them for a while and then moved them into various sexual acts before continuing his search. There were no sheets on any of the beds but an upstairs closet was full of wool blankets, old and plaid and smelling slightly of mothballs.

Ryan pulled another beer out of the fridge and brought both beer and blanket out to the front porch. He rolled a joint and smoked it slowly and looked out at the stars for a long, long time.

—-

Ryan woke up the next morning at noon, face pressed flat to the mattress to avoid the glare of the sun through the high, bare windows. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling and considered jerking off but mostly he just wanted breakfast. There was a sealed gallon of water underneath the sink and Ryan drank three glasses, one after the other, standing at the kitchen window and scrunching his toes along the uneven floorboards. There was time to jerk off later.

He padded out to the car in exactly what he'd woken up in, and then thought better of it and went back to grab the half-eaten sleeve of saltines off the porch. He didn't bother locking the door.

The rental car had a GPS built into the dashboard, and Ryan typed in SUPERMARKET in all capital letters while he munched on a saltine. It informed him in a clipped British accent that the travel time to his destination was approximately fifty-three minutes; halfway there, Ryan thought about putting on some music but realized he'd left his ipod sitting outside on the porch. He turned the radio on instead, humming along aimlessly to something by Crosby, Stills and Nash.

At least, Ryan thought it was Crosby, Stills and Nash. Maybe.

The supermarket turned out to be a newish Super Wal-Mart, judging from the heaps of backfill still pilled on the edges of the parking lot. Ryan pulled in and parked and then sat in the car for a little bit, trying to maybe conceptualize what the hell was going to buy. It wasn't something he normally did—Spencer and Brendon tended towards lists, Jon and Ryan and Alex tended towards "wander around the store until something looks interesting, then buy six"—but Ryan was trying to broaden his horizons. He was trying to grow as an artist and somewhere in there he had a vague notion that growing as an artist didn't involve starving to death in the desert because he'd come home with sixteen bags of potato chips and a can of peaches in heavy syrup. He tapped the pen against his lip absentmindedly and then wrote down 'eggs' underneath 'bread' and 'peanut butter' and 'whiskey.' His stomach growled.

The woman at the checkout counter had blond hair that was slowly fading into grey and a permanently unimpressed expression. She raised an eyebrow at Ryan's cart, piled high with interesting things he'd managed to find (asian pears, for one, smooth and faintly brown, and frozen garlic toast and strawberry-flavored margarita mix) and he raised an eyebrow right back. He had totally bought eggs, and bread, and peanut butter. His cart wasn't _that_ weird.

"Not from around here?" the woman said, and Ryan wanted to ask what had tipped her off, was it maybe his stupid $300 sunglasses or the pears, but he kept his mouth shut and nodded. He suddenly, violently missed L.A. He wanted sushi.

He bought four packs of cigarettes at the liquor store instead, two packs of djarum specials and one handle each of rum, whiskey, and tequila. It seemed like a lot, when they were all lined up on the counter in order of lightest to darkest, but Ryan figured it would be worse if he wanted to make margaritas or whiskey sours and had to drive two hours to get the booze. He smoked three of the cloves on the way home, the little trunk of his hatchback weighed down by his purchases. They made the inside of the rental car smell like incense and he still really wanted some fucking sushi, but that was okay. Maybe he could write a record about not getting the things he wanted when he wanted them.

Oh wait, he already had.

—-

Ryan unloaded all of his groceries by himself and thought about how he would update about this if he was still using Twitter. Something about how his arms fucking hurt _._ No, wait. _I think it's time the sixteen of us parted ways. you're really just weighing me down._

Yeah. That was it. Maybe there was a lyric in there somewhere.

Ryan wondered idly where his phone was.

—-

—-

Ryan sees 7am a lot the first few weeks, but only from the wrong side. He's used to being mostly nocturnal and despite the views and the wide, scraping expanse of the desert all around him, Ryan has little to no desire to reset his sleeping schedule just so he can explore it without dying. Besides, it's not like he doesn't know what it looks like; it's just a different sand, a different mess of dirt and rocks, a slightly different sky.

Ryan thinks about bumming around with Spencer in Spencer's dad's old station wagon, about setting off bottle rockets and seeing if they could attach Ryan's skateboard to the back of the car if Spencer drove really slowly. Hearing about the first time Spencer made out with a girl at a party, the way he flipped his hair out of his face and smiled that weird, pleased smile. Being sixteen feels like a lifetime away.

Ryan's twenty five, going on twenty six, and he hasn't really talked to Spencer in three years. They've run into each other at parties and cookouts, had dinner together and covered up their awkwardness with beer and slightly plastic reminiscences, but they haven't actually talked about anything of importance since they had agreed that Ryan and Jon should leave the band. If Ryan were the overly sentimental type, he'd think of it as a tiny hole in his chest, the sort of thing you don't notice until something gets lodged in it, and then it fucking hurts. Ryan likes to think he's not that sentimental anymore.

He doesn't know how Spencer feels about it, because he's never asked.

—-

Ryan jerks off 46 times in the first month, not that he's counting.

Ryan thinks about Spencer approximately 3 of those times. It's not that he means to, he usually starts out thinking about Z or any of his female friends, or god, what's her name, that chick from Rilo Kiley. Ryan had run into her at a few parties—Jenny, her name was Jenny—but even then he'd realized that there was cool and there was _cool_ , and as much as he likes to style himself as the former he's probably the latter and anyway, she'd pretty much brushed him off and if there's one thing Ryan knows how to recognize, it's disinterest.

The thing about Spencer is that it just happens, sometimes, and Ryan spent a few months being concerned about it back when it first started, but by this point he's accepted he's kind of a creep and it doesn't really faze him. It's just weird, how he'll be thinking about something incredibly filthy, and then it switches to something really mundane like Spencer's hands and suddenly he's coming like a freight train, toes curling and head thrown back on the dirty pillowcase. At least now he doesn't have to see Spencer afterwards, doesn't have to knock his eyes down and away when he runs into him in a tiny, cramped bus hallway.

Ryan thinks about Brendon twice, but as far as he's concerned, that never happened. There's fucked up and then there's _fucked up_ and Ryan wishes his subconscious would learn to compartmentalize a little better.

This time around, Ryan chalks it up to boredom. He's taken to wandering around the house aimlessly, as though he'll suddenly discover a new room or hallway if he looks hard enough. Alex had spent twenty minutes telling him over the phone, before it died, about how he needs to reorganize his surroundings, about how Ryan's creative juices will stagnate if he just sees things as the world wants him to see them and not as they really _are._

Ryan ends the call and finishes his beer and then decides to lay down in the upstairs hallway, just to see if Alex is right. The wood floor is cool and rather dusty against his bare shoulders and Ryan can't shake the feeling that he's not supposed to be lying down in a hallway, because it's a _hallway,_ which means Alex is probably right. He spends the next day turning all of the chairs in the house upside down, but he can't really sit in them that way, unless he crawls underneath them. He turns the one next to the fireplace right side up but he leaves the rest where they are. It looks like a small, very focused tornado hit his sitting room and the upstairs bedrooms. Ryan likes it.

He doesn't remember to charge his phone.


End file.
